Firstly I feel very bad and sorry about the people down there. It must terrible.

Haiyan is probably once-a-century event, it is really hard imagine even the strongest defences can contain the damage. Heck, even the world most earthquake prepared country (with plenty of resources in hand) get hammered. Natural disaster defences are build based on hindsight from past data with the intention of balancing construction cost and damage prevented. Any such defences are rarely designed to handle 100-year (or even longer) return disasters; and to make it more precise, we rarely know what are these 100-year return events and how big they are because there is no data.

Foreign governments spends trillions in the arms race and weaponizing terrorists around the world in the name of geo-strategies. The money spend on foreign human well-being is a miniscule. Nevertheless, it is hoped that foreign governments will spend more in delivering humanatarian aids, infrastructures and capacity building to vulnerable countries such as the dirt poor Filipinos so that they will not spend their lives slogging away in foreign lands.

The human suffering in the Philippines following typhoon Haiyan is being watched by millions of people in the comfort of their homes and or workplaces. The plight of the people who are begging for water, food and shelter and receiving very little is a disgrace.
The corporate world elite, by that I mean the aviation departments of petroleum giants, food conglomerates, wealthy individuals, telecom corporations and drilling companies (with helicopter fleets), should be able to supply and donate time and sustenance, using their aviation departments to shuttle food and water into Manila for distribution via helicopters to the stricken areas.
National airlines and their Alliances (Star Alliance and One World) in the past have always stepped up to the plate and organized (through staff volunteers) the distribution of aid.
We hardly ever hear of the contributions made by the large organizations, perhaps it's about time they did their bit.
J.R. Audette

I am very concerned by the speed of relief. It appears that military doen't have adequate transport to deliver relief goods. They may have some small choppers used to fight against insurgencies. Nothing more than that. They need large ships that can carry big trucks filled with food.

Calm down! The national govt is working and the international community is assisting. Your further catastrophizing does not help. It's not easy to help everyone fast enough because of Leyte's geographical layout, which causes logistical problems. Now, ask yourself: what did these local authorities do with the taxes they collected? Obviously, they did not use the money to build sufficient emergency shelters. The mayor of Tacloban was reportedly ensconced in his family resort when the typhoon made landfall. He simply told his constituents to flee. People who lack foresight, organizational skills, and genuine concern should not run for public office. My compatriots should have learned this lesson by now.

Typhoon Haiyan has turned out to be of real biblical proportions. The Filipino people are nice, decent and God fearing but believe in God in a wrong way i.e. father son and holy ghost. Does a father god kill and destroy his children like this? And the second typhoon is following Haiyan may be it is already there now. Osama Bin Ladin's body was drowned in these seas. Is the real God now starting his revenge which will include America too? America is already suffering from such tornadoes - Katrina, Sandy, etc. Rome had suffered a terrible earthquake after they had killed Jesus. May the real God have mercy on all of us?

I had a close encounter with the almighty Haiyan in Hainan island, where the center of Haiyan was only 80km away from Sanya. It didn't do much damage there, except some fallen trees and billboards. Sorry for the folks in the Philipines. They took a hit for the team.

Haiyan also brought China a huge loss and about 4 million people who have suffered becuause of the typhoon Haiyan.Unfortunately until now most people get nothing from China government,at the same time China Government says,it is going to give the Philippines an aid which already causes a great anger just as another Haiyan,most people are disappointed to China government.

First - I thank the world for all the help extended to my country. I also thank you for all your comments though I have noticed that most are blamed on the country's poverty and corruption. I would like to commend the efforts done by the government and the Filipino people before and after the storm. 10,000 people have died. Yes, it could have been prevented and the absolute way of preventing it is to evacuate the whole provinces...all residents of the different islands that were smashed by the typhoon. Doable? Yes, but it requires weeks..probably months because we would need a massive space for the evacuees. It may be easy for anyone to say that the cause is the lack of preparation but have you really understood my country's geography? We are a group of small islands...not a massive land like europe, america or the greater asia. The structures that we thought would be a safe place for us were also swallowed by the water and smashed by the wind. Tacloban is a flat land bounded by waters and the land area was easily drowned by the water that surrounds it.

You havn't seen the real disasters yet!
Obviously, Philippines per se is a catastrophe.
You will see lots of people starving and die from disease.
The country is totally unprepared. Delivery of aids over many islands will be extremely difficult. Military is totally inefficient and incompetent. President Aquino will be very lucky if he's not ousted by riots!

Although this certainly is the time for a steadfast focus on relief efforts - and not finger-pointing - one cannot help but wonder if more lives could have been saved but for the catastrophic mismanagement on the part of the authorities. Unlike an earthquake (or to a lesser extent, a tsunami), the likely path and ferocity can now be forecasted days in advance using satellite imagery and ocean-atmospheric coupled models. Even the ancillary dangers of a cyclone such as storm surge and flooding are relatively well understood and ought to have been accounted for by the authorities. To this end, my colleagues and I watched on in utter dismay as villagers standing in the path of the impending CAT 5 (>300kph wind gusts) attempted to ‘fortify’ their shanty dwellings instead of fleeing for refuge in higher ground (to escape storm surge) or hopping on a short ferry ride to shelter in the more sturdily built structures in Cebu. The fact that they were ushered into action suggested that they were informed that a cyclone was on its way – but the quality of information and pre-emptive disaster mitigation strategies must be reviewed. Tacloban in particular should have been completely evacuated owing to its geographical position at the mouth of Leyte gulf where winds would have whipped up an enormous storm surge within the gulf, and widespread flooding anticpated due to the wringing of more moisture from the system by its mountain ranges. This catastrophe serves as a very harsh reminder that policy/ scientific-communication/awareness and political will sorely lag behind science itself. Until governments demonstrate genuine effort in changing the status quo, preventable tragedies such as Haiyan will occur in the future, especially in a world where climate extremes are increasingly becoming the norm...

Yet, what have the Philippine government been doing in prevention planning and relief planning? What has it been doing with fortifying the infrastructure through all these decades? The exact timing and the exact path of the typhoons may be surprises, but the typhoons are certain a regularity in that country. The government (the present one and all the past ones) are morally culpable for the 10,000 dead and many more displaced.

Right after WW2, the Philippines (thanks for American governance) was the 2nd most advanced country in the West Asia-Pacific (not counting Australia and NZ). Now, it is poorer than Indonesia. The Philippines have obviously been misgoverned for decades by their own elites. And the Philippine culture is too laid-back, too easily self-satisfied, and complacent. I say all these with sadness, not with condescension. The Philippines could be (and deserves to be) a much better place to live.

You are absolutely right. The Philippines is rich in natural resources, but corruption in government is the curse that keeps most Filipinos poor. The elite mainly protects its own interests. However, complacency is not a national trait. Many Filipinos are working hard in our country and abroad, but millions are still mired in poverty because of lack of opportunities. And sadly, the poorest are having more and more children that they can barely feed, believing that the larger one's family is, the more "blessed" one is. This situation, which results in the presence of numerous informal settlers in makeshift houses, causes extreme difficulty in saving lives when a disaster strikes. I think what the Philippines must do in the long run, apart from purging the bureaucracy of corrupt officials, is to reassess its value system. Rather than argue about the "morality" of reproductive health, the Church and the State should come up with a conclusive, viable solution to poverty. Having said that, I also hope the wealthy Catholic Church would provide more financial support to the poorest families so that their children (barefoot, in some cases) could go to school instead of eking out a living by selling candles in church patios.

Disasters are avoidable if you prepare. Here in Savage Capitalist Porn Valley the fire dept has a Calif Emergency Prepardness Team. Given that the LA Fire Dpt keeps a database of porn productions and many firehouses are used as filming locations you are hunted by the paramedics if you oppose the Porn Empire. Many productions use the ambulance crews to round up civilians to participate in productions. The cover-up is essential, news in Ameirca "covers" the story. ie.. lies and distortions of the Savage empire that is the world's worst predator is the standard of press.

Now *that* is speculation. This, however, is a quote.
"it is likely that the global frequency of occurrence of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged, concurrent with a likely increase in both global mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed and precipitation rates."
About the same number of storms, but stronger.

Update your *sources*: IPCC-SREX 2012
"Confidence in projecting changes in the direction and magnitude of climate extremes depends on many factors, including the type of extreme, the region and season, the amount and quality of observational data, the level of understanding of the underlying processes, and the reliability of their simulation in models. Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios5 generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain. For projected changes by the end of the 21st century, either model uncertainty or uncertainties associated with emissions scenarios used becomes dominant, depending on the extreme. Low-probability, high-impact changes associated with the crossing of poorly understood climate thresholds cannot be excluded, given the transient and complex nature of the climate system."
The degree of uncertainty in current climate models is problematic, going to detailed predictions is asking too much to our current understanding.

You are ignoring the facts of the matter. The ACE in both the Atlantic and Pacific peaked in the 1990s. This was a strong storm, but only a CAT 4 when it hit the Philippines. It was a tragedy to be sure, but your bleating about global warming causing these things is not supported by evidence of any sort. The contrary has much to be said for it. The Atlantic had only two small hurricanes this season, neither of which made landfall. But, I doubt you will be convinced of anything even when presented with reality. True believers in the escathological cargo cult of the "Church of the AGW" are like that I am afraid.

Typhoon Haiyan has turned out to be of real biblical proportions. The Filipino people are nice, decent and God fearing but believe in God in a wrong way i.e. father son and holy ghost. Does a father god kill and destroy his children like this? And the second typhoon is following Haiyan may be it is already there now. Osama Bin Ladin's body was drowned in these seas. Is the real God now starting his revenge which will include America too? America is already suffering from such tornadoes - Katrina, Sandy, etc. Rome had suffered a terrible earthquake after they had killed Jesus. May the real God have mercy on all of us?
Global warming made by USA is being used to hang the noose around the necks of the same by God

Birth control is crucial for the Philippines. 103 million people in fragmented island chain of limited resources is a sin allowed by the Church. Corruption and indifference makes it worse. Typhoons will happen and more will die. Filipinos must wake up to this.

The opening of the world climate congress in Poland devoted a few minutes to the tragedy, but these delegates, like those before them, will not have the courage to face the ultimate problems: over-population and over-consumption.
Those of us living in the 1st world are encouraged by our governments to buy thousands of useless products a year, to keep employment high. And those of us living in the developing world want to join the spending spree for i- and other junk.

From a purely ecological perspective, culling by the weather is the only acceptable way. No birth control, there is hardly any way for the government to provide for the people let alone to cope with disasters like a typhoon. The countries that need to have more babies are not and the countries that cannot afford to have that many babies are having more than they can care for.

Violent death by extreme weather is not only an awful way to reduce population, it is also a very ineffective way. 5,000 babies are born every day in the Philippines, so the current official death toll from Haiyan was replaced in less than 12 hours. Significant reduction of the breeding rate is the only effective way of reducing population and poverty and reducing our human strain on each other and the earth.